Professional Site of Patrick English - Elections, Forecasting, Research

Monday, 12 September 2016

New Publication

I have recently had research conducted with the LIVEWHAT research project published by the journal Politics and Policy. The paper investigates what impact the financial crisis had on the discursive behaviour of the Conservative and Labour parties in the United Kingdom. It finds that though the crisis provided an opportunity for the recent history of convergence to break down, that up until 2014 this had not occurred, and the Labour and Conservative Parties were remarkably similar to each other in terms of their framing and narrating of the financial crisis.

The methodology is of interest to any scholar looking to quantitatively analyse data which is in essence qualitative. Or who wishes to connect necessarily theoretical concepts to necessarily empirical data. In our case, we had a collection of newspaper articles spanning nearly a decade which we wanted to transform into data which we could numerically and graphically present and analyse. The method we opted for was a form of Weberian Ideal Type Analysis by the name of Fuzzy Set Analysis. We borrowed the design from Kvist's 2005 paper analysing the fit of modern economies into traditional theoretical economies. Essentially, the analysis allows the researcher to consider the 'ideal type' of phenomena 'x', and then analyse the extent to which an actual 'x' fits into this ideal type. For our research, we slightly adapted the logic of this approach and used the Conservative framing and narrating of the crisis as the 'ideal type', and looked at the extent to which the Labour Party matched it.

The full paper can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12160/abstract

I also contributed to another paper within the same journal, which looks at the extent to which actors during the crisis sought to 'dehumanise' the context of crisis: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12161/abstract